The Past Year
Well its been a hectic, busy and fun time in my second full year working for The Eastern Echo. I've been meaning to post a lot more on here and this is about my third attempt to finish this blog post. It seems every time I try and write I distract myself with something else to do. Anyways let me try and recap what has happened to me since September.
It was another season of Eastern Michigan football and to put it nicely it wasn't pretty. Ron English, now in his 5th season as head coach, was fighting to keep his job for next year. Let's just say that it didn't go so well when a tape was released of him degrading his players. http://www.easternecho.com/multimedia/8077 Not exactly the best thing to do. The good news is I really, really like Chris Creighton, new head football coach, and I'm exciting to see what he brings in the fall. Ok I'm sidetracking my post right now but I figured that was worth sharing. Anyways at the Echo this year we decided to expand our coverage out to Ann Arbor with some Michigan football.
It was definitely cool because growing up in Ann Arbor and going to high school across the street from the "Big House", it was nice to finally work there. If you want to read my full post you can find it here: http://www.mascharkaphoto.com/blog/2013/10/shooting-at-the-big-house
So after football season ended, it was finally time for basketball to start up. Now I'll be completely honest basketball is 100% my favorite sport to cover. There's just so much action that you can capture. So I decided I was going to do my best to shoot every single game. The places that I traveled over this year made it that much better. (Kentucky, Cleveland, Purdue, etc..)
First off I was able to travel down to Lexington, Kentucky to shoot EMU vs. Kentucky which was absolutely awesome. Rupp Arena is simply phenomenal. Definitely the most interesting part to me were the indoor fireworks during introductions, granted it totally caught me off guard.
Overall though this Eastern Michigan basketball team was such a cool group of guys. They made my job so much more fun than it already was whether it be with pre game dunk contests or goofing around on the bench. It was just a lot of fun to be able to follow them!
Eventually it came time to go back down to Cleveland for the 2014 Mid American Conference Tournament. Now the tournament takes place in the middle of March and you'd think on most years that you wouldn't have to worry about road conditions... Well... WRONG.. We headed down to Cleveland in what was considered white out conditions and then we got stuck on the Ohio Turnpike for 12 hours and missed the first game of the tournament. (Really long story, if you want to see what we went through I made a video of it all. See below)
Eventually we did get down there but it just took a little longer than expected.
Alright so the above photo was our hotel. That alone made our horrible trip worth it. It was definitely a stunning building.
Now the food was on par with what it was last year, which was phenomenal! And EMU held off Bobby Hurley's led Buffalo which was also quite nice!
They then went up against Toledo which sadly they didn't pull off the win but it was still an overall great time in Cleveland.
Along all this time I was also able to cover awesome events such as the Gymnastics MAC Championship, The Football MAC Championship and The Little Caesars Bowl. All of which were unique experiences of their own but there's only so much I can say in a blog post before I lose everyones interest. Which with that said if you're still reading at this point then I really appreciate you!
Anyways I just finished up getting ready and setting my work up for our year end Photo Gala at WCC. That was an absolutely phenomenal experience! Here is the setup of my work from it.
Overall it has been an even better year than last and I cannot wait to see what awaits me in the Fall! I was able to climb the ranks of the Echo from being a sports photographer to now being the Multimedia Editor. This was the best accomplishment of them all! Thanks for reading all the way to here and like I always say hopefully I'm a bit more consistent with these posts in the future!
Oh and just for kicks for the end of the post. Here is a totally unrelated shot I got a couple nights ago during a thunderstorm in Ann Arbor! See you later!